All matter printed in THE MEDICAL PICKWICK, unless otherwise specified s contributed exclusively to this magazine. Address all communications relating to editorial matter to the Editor, who will be pleased to consider manuscript suitable for publication in THE MEDICAL PICKWICK and will return those unavailable if postage is enclosed. He is not responsible for the opinion of contributors. All manuscripts and communications of a business nature should be addressed to Medical Pickwick Press, 15 East 26th Street, New York City. Subscription price in the United States, $3.00; Canada, $3.25; Foreign, $3.50. Single Copies, 35 cents. THE Copyright, 1921, by Medical Pickwick Press. JUNE, 1921. THE SHIFTING SHORES. HE spirit of unrest that permeates the industrial world is indicative of an alteration of personal philosophy. After the forces of altruistic action came upon an immovable body of opinions they became spent, and, thus weakened, became subordinate to the more powerful egocentric motives. Whether in the international, national, familial, or individual realm of living, the leading question today is "What do we get out of it?" This viewpoint is by no means unique nor does it per se smack of radicalism. The query is distorted by the peculiar circumstances of the world's existence and thus appears to be conditioned along dangerous lines. There is no doubt that there is an omni-present feeling that civilization may have been saved by war, but many are wondering whether it was worth saving at such a sacrifice. The influence of the idea of failure is more widespread than is generally admitted. The desire to hold influence with constituencies handicaps the frank expression of opinions and disguises convictions that arise from a knowledge of particularized facts that have been denied publicity. In the interests of harmony compromises are essential, but too frequently these are represented as demanding the maintenance of the status quo ante, however indeterminate this status quo may be. a new series of epithets have been invented and applied to stigmatize the inferiority of those who honestly differ with the viewpoints of the majority. The efforts at stifling convictions are productive of greater intellectual unrest than could arise through open debate or frank argument. The medical profession has not been above infection by the microbe of expletives. The physician who dares to utter opinions at variance with the accepted dicta of his guild is attacked as intellectually dishonest, arrogant, selfexploiting, Bolshevist, or a strabismic uplifter. Such personal abuse is not reasoning nor does it pass for intelligent characterization among those who seek truth. The unrest in medicine is merely a symptom of the changing philosophy of this age. Whither are we drifting? Who knows? Who can prophesy with certainty? Present ills cry out to be cured but the cures may cause newer and more enervating complaints. The experimentalist in therapy craves an opportunity to present his theories for discussion. He may be right and he may be wrong-but he is entitled to a fair hearing. No group in the profession nor any single man is blessed with omniscience, wherefore tolerance is essential. The progress of the next generation is being determined by the growth of the ideals and philosophy of this age and generation. Openmindedness and the free interchange of ideas are requisite. Blind, dogmatic and unalterable partisanship may promote some forms of the stability but a static world no longer exists. In the dynamics of the world there are rest periods only sufficiently long to develop new energies of greater power to sway mankind. The forceful unrest of a changing philosophy is manifest in every field of human enterprise including medicine. What is the future of medicine? The answer is be ing compounded in Destiny's cauldrons which are seething and boiling down the elements of all forms of unrest into more concentrated and more useful palliatives and curatives for medical woes. In order to keep the expression of thought under control memorial lust of possession. PROTEOSES AND PEPTONES In "The Outline of History," Mr. H. G. Wells has had the temerity to begin his story, not with the earliest civilization, but with the origin of the earth itself. It seems to have astonished the world that the origin of the earth itself is a subject included in history instead of in geology. And the critics have taken Mr. Wells to task on this point and on that: Mr. Wells is not a geologist and his geology is faulty; he is not a paleontologist, and his paleontology is faulty; he is not a historian, and his history is faulty. Aside from that, Mr. Wells has produced an excellent book. Thus the critics. "The Outline of History; being a plain history of life and mankind, by H. G. Wells; written with the advice. and editorial help of Mr. Ernest Barker, Sir H. H. Johnston, Sir E. Ray Lankester and Professor Gilbert Murray, and illustrated by J. F. Horrabin." Such is the title, and the two volumes, at $10.50 per pair, are being bought and read by people who buy many books, and by people who buy few books and particularly few books at $10.50. It is a work that has already taken its place among the books that have stimulated human thought. "The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have brought all men closer to one another for good or evil. War becomes a universal disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its cradle and sinks the foodships that cater for the non-combatant and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a century or more ago it is the gist of his tract upon universal peace is now plain to the man in the street. Our internal policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations. Surely a book that is dedicated to so noble a cause must challenge the attention of anyone who pauses to wonder, in this seething age, whither mankind is bound. And because Mr. Wells is an entertaining as well as an instructive writer, he is getting his great message across where a historian would fail. The Outline should appeal to physicians above all other classes of readers, because the education of a physician, though limitation of knowledge prevents its including a conception of the origin of life, does approach the subject of life itself. Therefore this page does itself the honor this month to quote a few passages: "Wherever the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity. "The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches today. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against which at first it had no protection. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides, any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep its moisture during hours of low tide or drought met with every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches in the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved, of course, in water) and light. "No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture in our lungs; and all our food must be liquefied before it can be assimilated. Waterliving creatures which are always under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water, must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from drying up." This was the beginning of the Proterozoic age, or age of primitive life, twenty million or two hundred million years after the earth was formed. The Proterozoic age is said to have been sixty million or six hundred million years ago; between four and five times as remote as the "Such are the views of history that this Outline seeks Mesozoic age, the age of reptiles, when the dinosaur to realize." occurred. And notwithstanding the cartoonist's fancy of primitive man leading the dinosaur about with a string, the dinosaur had been extinct for ten million or a hundred million years before there was any primitive man. "Primordial man, before he could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very cleverly, gestured, laughed, danced and lived, without much speculation about whence he came or why he lived. He feared the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms and big animals and queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no doubt he did things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck and please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He made no clear distinction between animate and inanimate things; if a stick hurt him, he kicked it; if the river foamed and flooded, he thought it was hostile. His thought was probably very much at the level of a bright little contemporary boy of four or five. He had the same subtle unreasonableness of transition and the same limitations. But since he had little or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that came to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them." And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to die-that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase. To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches." "Our Outline of History has been ill written if it has failed to convey our conviction of the character of the state toward which the world is moving. *** The attainment of this world state may be impeded and may be opposed today by many apparently vast forces; but it has, urging it on, a much more powerful force, that of the free and growing common intelligence of mankind. ***And this world state will be sustained by a universal education, organized upon a scale and of a penetration and quality beyond all present experience. The whole race, and not simply classes and peoples, will be educated. *** The world state's organization of scientific research and record compared with that of today will be like an ocean liner beside the dugout canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer. *** Its economic organization will be an exploitation of all natural wealth and every fresh possibility science reveals, by the agents and servants of the common government for the common good. Private enterprise will be the servant-a useful, valued and well-rewarded servant and no longer the robber master of the commonweal." After a lapse of perhaps 50,000 years: "Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a midsummer day's morning. The torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, perhaps fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted masks not the robed and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have been-of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of shock-headed men and naked children. They have assembled from many distant places; the ground be tween the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encampments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. This is truly a magnificent optimism that gives new courage for the meeting of the tasks at hand. Those who recall with disappointment that the present age is a departure from the one anticipated by Edward Bellamy in "Looking Backward" (1888), will be pleased to note considerable resemblance between the visions of these two imaginative men, and may feel that Bellamy's error lay only in anticipating the millennium at too early a date. A PROBLEM IN ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION. |